Discovery Awaits the Mind That Pursues It
It’s tempting when we talk to others about our ideas to only want to share the good stuff. To only share the things we think are logical, sound reasonable, maybe only the things we think (or hope) will make us seem smart and focused. But this tendency to re-frame our…
How to use the trial and error method to make a scientific discovery. I like moving, exploring new places, and visiting friends and family (for short manageable doses). I can put up with traveling for work. But one thing never ceases to annoy me: Whenever I take a shower…
I once told a fellow graduate student at a nuclear physics summer school that, “I don’t speak math.” He found this very funny, and me very funny. But I absolutely meant it. In fact, I was angry about it. By that time, I had already met the sleep-depriving scientific discovery…
The idea of mapping information is heavily used and widely favored today. There are mind maps, geographical terrain maps, all manner of mathematical graphs to map relationships, and maps for “landscape analysis” used to summarize the state of the art in many fields. But it turns out that when I…